Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler of It
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4. Exile as Resistance and a Mora l Stance: Karl Kraus, A rthur Schnitzler Let us now return to the more intrinsic components of exile, such as those represented in the work of two Austrian literary giants of the early twentieth century, Karl Kraus and Arthur Schnitzler. Like Hofmannsthal, Musil, and Broch, they were profoundly critical of the society in which they lived. However, their criticism is not of a philosophical and abstract character; rather, it consists of a direct criticism of society and a realistic depiction of its troubling condition. Furthermore, instead of being largely ignored, their ideas were regarded as scandalous. The ingenious Karl Kraus (b. 1874 in Jičín, d. 1936 in Vienna), hailing from Bohemia but settling in the cultural mecca of the time, Vienna, published his famous experimental and extensive play The Last Days of Mankind in 1919. Standing against a decaying European civilization with his sharp and relentless wit, Kraus expressed the form of exile as a resistance to the value system, or a lack thereof, of European society. A similar type of exile, a distinctively moral stance, is presented in Arthur Schnitzler’s (b. 1862 in Vienna, d. 1931 in Vienna) novel Professor Bernhardi (1912). Both The Last Days of Mankind and Professor Bernhardi, like the authors discussed in the previous chapters, explore the alienation of values. The struggle against the society’s immorality is clearly a lost cause for the heroes of all these works; however, they insist on sustaining a certain moral stance, which excludes them from society and makes outcasts of them. Karl Kraus was an uncompromising critic of practically everything Austrian, from politics to psychoanalysis, to Zionism, nationalism, economic policies, and corruption: “Kraus wrote 35 4. Exile as Resistance and a Moral Stance as if Zionism was merely another fad, invented by ‘Ringstrasse’ dandies like Herzl, to whom he objected first and foremost as a ‘littérateur’ of the ‘Young Vienna’ school and as a journalist of the ‘Neue Freie Presse.’”21 He was for decades an intimate friend of the famed Czech aristocrat Sidonie Nádherná, who never married him, possibly succumbing to the opinion of her other important literary friend, Rainer Maria Rilke, who was objecting to Kraus’s “unrepeatable difference” (considered to be a euphemism for Jewishness). Kraus was a member of the bohemian circle Jung Wien (with Herzl, Hofmannsthal, Zweig, and Schnitzler), which met at Café Griensteidl, later in Café Central. In 1899, he founded his own newspaper Die Fackel (The Torch). From 1911, the newspaper was written by him exclusively until his death in 1936. He was also an influential speaker. At the peak of his popularity, his lectures attracted up to 4,000 people and Die Fackel sold 40,000 copies. We cannot, then, put him exactly into the category of outsider. His masterpiece The Last Days of Mankind (1919) is a large satirical play about WWI. The play combines dialogue from contemporary documents with apocalyptic fantasy and commentary by two characters called “the Grumbler” and “the Optimist.” The play was self-published in Die Fackel and its first performance was in Turin in 1991, long after Kraus’s death. Yet, although it only appeared in his newspaper, it stimulated a new type of documentary theater in 1920s Germany. The play was an ethical protest and Kraus refused to let it be turned into a spectacle. His emphasis was on poetry, not on theatrical effects and entertainment. Kraus also wrote a satire on the Nazis, The Third Walpurgis Night (1933), which he was afraid to publish, only printing extracts from it in Die Fackel under the title Why the Torch Does Not Appear in 1936. He abandoned Judaism in 1911 and became a Catholic; but in 1923, due to the Church’s support for Hitler, he abandoned Catholicism as well. He was a meticulous user of language, as well as a critic 21 Robert S. Wistrich, “Karl Kraus: Jewish Prophet or Renegade?,” European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe 9, no.2 (Summer 1975): 33. 36 Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler of it. Language was extremely important to him. He wrote: “Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.” Kraus’s criticism of humanity is thorough and relentless. He is even such a critic of Jews that many consider him to be a Jewish antisemite. His form is avant-garde and replete with estrangements, such as making documents into characters and emphasizing that words have the same level of culpability as deeds. He portrays the terrible moral decay of his society, which spreads hatred regardless of the toll it will take; he stands at the very center of a society, yet in total opposition to it; he shows how the perversity of propaganda leads to brutality and sadism. Ignorance is rampant, he argues. His expressionistic drama is constructed from documents and events, while apparitions raise it to a transcendent place where God passes judgment on mankind as deserving of total annihilation for its desecration of nature, human, and animal life, as well as its utter inhumanity. Kraus acts as the moral conscience of humanity, unveiling its ignorant illusions and their horrifying consequences. His work is prophetic and gives the moral stance rendered in Hofmannsthal’s Tower a global dimension. Having been an extremely popular satirist, Kraus represents the extreme end of the concept of exile since he condemns humanity to extinction. His play is extremely successful as theatre because of its multiple juxtapositions, contrasts, and rich visual effects. The perversity of humanity, however, leading to apocalyptic despair is The Last Days of Mankind’s central theme. Kraus’s method is very complex, shifting from expressionism to surrealism (e.g. the transformation of humans into animals). The play is a montage of heterogeneous materials and was eventually staged at the end of the twentieth century all over the world. It is now recognized as a masterpiece. Arthur Schnitzler was a realistic writer, a master of micro-fiction and humor, and the first to write German stream-of-consciousness narration. Kraus and Schnitzler were essentially enemies. Schnitzler provoked Vienna society first with his frank, amoral descriptions of sexuality, which evoked admiration even from Freud (e.g. Reigen [1897]). His work was so scandalous that it was more famous for being banned than for being staged. His stories are mostly elegies 37 4. Exile as Resistance and a Moral Stance for a vanished world that often end in suicide. His daughter actually committed suicide Schnitzler died of a brain hemorrhage three years after her death. Later in life, Schnitzler also took a strong stand against antisemitism in the play Professor Bernhardi (1912), where he dissects Austrian antisemitism and its insidious, multiple forms. While Herzl views antisemitism as a political and social issue, Schnitzler sees it as a psychological question and a private experience. In his work, Schnitzler takes the position of a west Austrian Jew, who considers himself as more Austrian than Jewish, yet he always feels a deep sense of isolation and confusion regarding his identity. For such a Jew, Herzl’s solution of abandoning his home country and starting a new life in a faraway nationally defined country is not practical. In Professor Bernhardi, the various characters express respect for the Jewish protagonist Bernhardi, the chair of a private medical institute in Vienna, but they actually orchestrate his downfall because of their maddening half-heartedness. Such half-heartedness in moral attitudes was characteristic of Vienna at the turn of the century. Bernhardi, who loses his position due to his ethical stance protecting a patient’s well-being against a Catholic priest, becomes completely disillusioned with human society, its indifference, which only too readily concedes its own weakness and adopts an attitude of resigned self-irony. This corrupt world contaminates pure individuals. Rather than engaging in politics, Bernhardi chooses to go to prison, which he finds completely embarrassing. He takes a public stand, but refuses to bastardize it by having it misused by press and political parties for their own purposes. The social process makes nonsense out of Bernhardi’s attempt at consistency and integrity. Passionate moral despair thus results. At the same time, the greatness of Schnitzler’s art consists in him not intruding with an explicit critical voice in the play. As Schlein notes, “it is this very lack of intrusion and explicit criticism that make his works doubly effective.”22 The play also portrays the impossibility of forming a commitment to wider society for Jews, due to their 22 Rena A. Schlein, “The Motif of Hypocrisy in the Works of Arthur Schnitzler,” Modern Austrian Literature 2, no. 1 (Spring 1969): 28. 38 Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler general nonacceptance as well as an acute sense of isolation of a morally oriented individual. Schnitzler’s works were called “Jewish filth” by Adolf Hitler and were banned by the Nazis in Austria and Germany. In 1933, when Joseph Goebbels organized book burnings in Berlin and other cities, Schnitzler’s works were thrown into the flames along with those of other Jews, such as Einstein, Marx, Kafka, Freud, and Stefan Zweig. .